Guide for having a better Training and Development Plan

While recruiting a candidate, we see the educational qualification that must be suitable for the open position available in the organization and the professional skills as per their prior work experience. The recruiter rarely gets an idea about the employee’s working style and on the job performance. And hence, over a period of time, the training and development team starts getting training requirements in technical skills or soft skills. In such a rapidly changing environment, it is next to impossible to have the employee’s focus on their work for a longer stretch of time.

It is extremely important to have a separate division for training and development in every organization who can exclusively work for the development of the existing employees and be training the new employees according to our organization’s culture and requirements.

Here, we are sharing the guide to get involved in the training and development of the employees in your organization following very simple steps.

Benchmarking the training and skill set level. First of all, you need to know who you are competing with. There should be a benchmarking process done to match the skill set for your specific industry and for the particular job role. Once you know the exact market scenario in terms of employee’s skill-set, preparing training and development modules would be much easier and having a clear path.

Internal Employee Survey. The next step comes to have a detailed survey of the organization. Prepare different surveys for the management team asking them their employee's training requirements according to them and the other one for the employees/ team members to share their concerns where they need training and help. Accordingly, the training and development team should move forward preparing the modules for the employees fulfilling the requirements of members as well as the team leaders. Once the training modules start getting prepared on the basis of the needs of the people of the organization, the result will emerge on its own.

Training and Development is a Business on its own. Training and development is not just a part of human resources team, rather it is run like a whole business as such. It has such a huge process starting from training need analysis, preparing modules, getting it verified by the leaders, aligning them to the organizational goals or project goals specifically, delivering the training, and then looking for the results if any. It needs investment in terms of time, energy as well as money. So, keep the process of training and development just like setting up a business that would include:

Aligning training programs and organizational goals. If training and development plan is not aligned with the ultimate goal of achieving the organizational goal, then there is no point of even considering the department at all. There is no need to train Sachin Tendulkar for goalkeeping when he is going to play Cricket in the end. Hence, whenever you are preparing the modules or deciding on the training topics, you need to consider the organizational motives and purpose.

Be innovative. Training should not be boring and stagnant for any employee or a team or an organization. The trainer and the team need to be innovative and creative with their ideas and thoughts. A training session should be a perfect blend of theory clarification and practical aspects. If you think there is not much material to deliver full-day training, the training session should be called for an hour or two. The duration is not a problem but if the employees start getting bored and losing interest, then it is waste of time and energy of the trainer as well as the employees.

Calculate ROI and Results. Only delivering the sessions is not the motto of the training and development team, rather they need to monitor the changes after the training and the return on investment as well. Having a proper check on the return and the impacts will only fulfil the purpose of training.